News From the 802.11 Planet Conference

• Can Public Hotspots Make Money?
• Wi-Fi Goes to School
• Three's Company on 802.11 Planet
• Self-Healing Peer-to-Peer Mesh
• The New Shape of WLAN Cards

by InternetNews Staff [June 13, 2002]

The news just keeps pouring in from the 802.11 Planet Conference in Philadelphia, run by INT Media Group, the parent company of this website.

Can Public Hotspots Make Money?
At the 802.11 Planet Conference, the message to the public hotspot market is: Forget John Q. Public, unless he's carrying a briefcase.

Analysts said the market for public hotspots, despite all the hype, doesn't appear all that large, except for niche providers for business travelers. According to Cahners In-Stat analyst Gemma Paolo, today there are just 41,000 hotspot subscribers. Even with that figure forecast to grow to 40,000 by 2006, the economics of the industry are problematic.

"For the pure plays, there's probably room only for a handful to survive," said Yankee Group analyst Adam Zawel. "We've been playing with the numbers, and then you've got all these players dipping in, and it just gets really thin."

A slide Paolo showed of the more than two dozen companies in the public hotspot space showed how many players had rushed in, despite the cautionary tale of MobileStar's demise. Executives from three of those companies explained why they would be among the chosen few.

Wayport has set its sights firmly on the business traveler. "Our focus is where does this type of customer need the connectivity the most," said Daniel Lowden, Wayport's VP of marketing and business development. "Typically, they're spending most of their time in hotels and airports."

To reach the traveler, Wayport has partnered with 460 hotels and four airports, spreading the up-front costs unlike MobileStar's model. Wayport also has 13 business centers through its acquisition of Laptop Lane locations.

Like Wayport, WiFi Metro thinks the on-the-go businessperson is an ideal customer. Since launching in January, WiFi Metro has opened 60 hotspots, including a six-block "hotzone" in San Jose. WiFi Metro founder Arturo Pereyra said WiFi Metro also targets the 43 million business travelers, along with the 78 million mobile workers, like pharmaceutical sales representatives.

"It won't be everywhere," Pereyra said, "but it will be everywhere that it makes sense."

Swimming against the tide, Surf and Sip President Rick Ehrlinspiel said the public hotspot market could support the coffee-shop model. With 126 shops in 17 states, Ehrlinspiel said the Surf and Sip can sell coffee shops on Wi-Fi as a customer-acquisition tool.

"You get addicted to this stuff," he said. "It's worse than crack."

The analysts warned that the cellular carriers are circling. T-Mobile, now the owner of MobileStar's network of hotspots, and SprintPCS, investor in hotspot aggregator Boingo, already made cautious moves into the market.

"We are seeing carriers take an interest," Zawel said. But analysts cautioned that carriers were unlikely to rush into a market so young, and with such uncertain economics.

"It's a new business and very different from what they're used to doing," said Lowden, pointing out that the hotspot companies have agility, speed and know-how in their favor. "This is not an easy business."

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Wi-Fi Goes to School
The numbers are undeniably big: 12,000 schools, 87,000 faculty and administration, and over 1 million students. But Kevin Mazzatta, a wireless client solutions executive at IBM, counters with his own numbers: hundreds of offices dotting the globe, 325,000 employees, and tens of thousands of mobile workers like himself.

If there ever was a match for the unwieldy New York City school system, IBM is it. Mazzatta and IBM have taken on the task of outfitting New York City's schools with 802.11b capabilities. "We could relate to them because of our own experience" giving workers wireless solutions, he said Tuesday afternoon at the 802.11 Planet Conference.

The program to outfit the New York City school system with Wi-Fi began last year, when IBM signed on to unwire the Big Apple's schools through the federal E-Rate program. With E-Rate's Universal Service Fund, created in 1997 to provide federally subsidized technology equipment to schools and libraries, most of New York's poorest schools could qualify for 90 percent discounts on "all commercially available telecommunications services," including wireless. In the first four years of the program, New York City schools have received more than $500 million in technology help.

In the third quarter of 2001, IBM had authored a plan to outfit the schools. With Wi-Fi, schools could spread access more evenly to students, instead of having them crowded around the one or two Internet-ready computers in the classroom. And under the e-rate program, Mazzatta pointed out, an access point (AP) that would have cost $1,000 would cost a school about $75.

Explaining IBM's program, Mazzatta said the "n-generation" needed to be taught in different ways. "We teach students now to learn how to learn, instead of just absorbing," he said.

But setting out to wire 12,000 schools spread across five boroughs would seem an insurmountable task. IBM started incrementally. At the end of last year, just months after its report to the New York City Board of Education, Big Blue unveiled its pilot 802.11 program at a school in Jamaica, Queens.

By the end of the year, IBM hopes to have 450 schools 802.11 capable, with 15,000 APs. Mazzatta said the placement of antennas became an unexpected issue. "We are talking about junior-high and high-school kids, so there's the vandalism aspect," he cautioned.

Mazzatta said the wiring of the schools took just two days, but the process of dealing with the triple threat of federal red tape, the slow-moving Board of Education, and the whims of principals' schedules made the process longer.

"Everyone has to have a say in it," he said.

Even if IBM were to plunk APs in every classroom in the city, Mazzatta warned New York's 1 million students would not automatically have always-on, high-speed, mobile Internet access: The program only provides the infrastructure.

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Three's Company on 802.11 Planet
With 802.11a products due to hit the market soon and an 802.11g standard in the offing, a battle between the two standards for the mantle of successor to 802.11b would seem only natural. In the end, though, the 802.11 world might just be big enough for all three.

Speaking at the 802.11 Planet Conference, Yorman Solomon, director of business development for Texas Instrument's wireless networking business unit, neatly summed up the situation.

"802.11b is here to stay," he said, "and it's here to coexist with 802.11a and 802.11g."

The reason for the resilience of 802.11b, also known as Wi-Fi, is its continued popularity. In his keynote opening the conference Tuesday morning, Dennis Eaton, chairman of the 802.11 trade group Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance (WECA), said Wi-Fi was a "promiscuous technology," outstripping even the most optimistic predictions. "The growth has never ceased to amaze me," he said, "and we believe we're at the beginning of the growth curve."

Eaton referred to statistics from Cahners In-Stat stating that 50 million people would use 802.11 in 2005. Solomon said that figure was most likely low, joking, "This is the first time in history I say the numbers from the analysts are way too low."

Both Jim Zyren, the director of strategic marketing in Intersil's wireless networking products unit, and Richard Redelfs, CEO and president of Atheros Communications, agreed.

"You have to have 802.11b. It's the standard," Zyren said.

Solomon said 802.11b will continue to hold sway because its install base is already between 15 million and 20 million.

"We want to drive this industry and 11b is the standard that's going to drive this industry," he said.

While Intersil's Zyren touted 802.11g's coverage and Atheros' Redelfs sang the praises of 802.11a's roomy 5 GHz spectrum space, both agreed that a universal client would eventually take root. Naturally, they disagreed about which standard would operate most prominently along Wi-Fi.

Once again, however, Solomon was able to split the difference, saying, "Let's use both. Why do we need to choose one over the other?"

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Self-Healing Peer-to-Peer Mesh
At the 802.11 Planet Conference & Expo, mobile broadband network company MeshNetworks, a company that has technology to turn any wireless, mobile node into an extender of a wireless LAN to createa "self-healing" peer-to-peer mesh, is teaming up with Troy, Michigan's Delphi to create a test network in Delphi's Kokomo, IN plant to try the technology for telematic (in car data and entertainment delivery) use.

Delphi's test in Kokomo will support voice, data, and video feeds to and from the vehicle at WLAN broadband speed. Because the MeshNetworks QDMA technology has geo-location technology built in, using that capability for navigation and location awareness will be part of the telematic test. The two company's engineers have already integrated the MeshNetworks technology successfully with Delphi's development platform under both Linux and Windows.

Delphi's Electronics and Mobile Communication division is already under way making a telematic, in-car, 802.11b-based product called CommuniPort for availability in 2004 and has previously demonstrated use of WLAN technology for sending audio data files to vehicles.

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The New Shape of WLAN Cards
Fabless semiconductor manufacturer SyChip, of Plano, TX, announced that they're getting into the 802.11b chip set space with a reference design for a secure digital (SD) input/output WLAN card.

An SD card, usually used as a memory storage card, is about the size of a postage stamp—32mm x 24mm x 2.1mm. SD slots are generally found in personal digital assistants (PDAs) such as the Palm m500.

SyChip's modules will support Windows 2000/XP/CE (2.11 or greater), and the Palm OS 4 and higher.

SyChip expects an evaluation card for the embedded module, and the support material for the reference design to be ready by the third quarter, with the samples of the full SD NIC card by the end of the year.

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